At The Green House. . .

Our new Green House Business Cards are arriving today and I feel just like Steve Martin in “The Jerk,” with the phone book. . . like I’m going to be validated as an official cartoonist of a great Green comic strip as soon as the business cards arrive (Yes, I’m stalking, er, TRACKING them with the UPS app).

The image featured today is a portion of the inside card art. Peter and I created a folded business card, because we wanted people to get “inside” the Green House, starting with opening the card to get inside our group of characters and critters. One funny little story that cropped up while working on the card, came from Peter’s house. Peter’s son, Bodhi was inspecting the card art and asked who the character was next to Wormy on the Pagoda. Peter replied that it was “Hunny B,” and Bodhi thought for a moment and said, “you’ve never had her in a strip, have you?”

Ummm. . .  that would be a “correct, we haven’t, Bodhi. . .” although it took Peter and I both a few seconds to think about it. Somewhere around 2008, Peter and I created this character that until today has only appeared in Peter’s Sketchbook and inside one of our Christmas cards, although she’s been in our consciousness for a long time. We roughed out a few storylines with her and filled a few pages with notes and images as we hashed out the details of her character.

Her full name is Hunny B. Tokeless and she’s a holistic healing honey bee. She plays guitar and is into astrology, herbal medicines and holistic healing. She seemed like a natural addition to the garden critter group as she could provide us all with information about the many uses of all the wonderful plants in the Green’s garden. We thought Wormy could use a female influence as well and she just created herself with a few swipes of Peter’s pencil and a lot of laughs and ‘OH!. . . OH. .  what if . . .” moments.

Bee’s are amazing creatures and we hope Hunny will be just as amazing and interesting as her character and stories develop. Speaking of which, here’s a link to a great article on the fascinating Bee. We shared this on our Facebook page earlier in the week and have received some nice feedback and personal insights from y’all about your experiences with bees. I started a hive a few years ago, which I had to dismantle due to overwhelming interest from our local black bears. . . well, I dismantled it before they did, but it was a great learning experience. I hope you all find Hunny B. to be fascinating and funny too.

13 Fascinating Facts about Bees (from mental_floss.com)   Click on the bees below. . .